Fashion Yearbook

It’s been a while since Mae and Jane have sat down to the keyboard and blogged. This is because we are finishing up our school years and could not justify writing a blog instead of writing the paper that we had coming up. Mae still has some time left in school. But Jane just finished her last finals, papers, and homework assignments before she will graduate. So we thought we’d commemorate some of Jane’s more horrendous achievements in fashion as an undergraduate. (We’d also like to take a moment to be cliché and say we’re looking forward to all of her fashion endeavors!)

Now, Jane was fortunate enough to have a roommate who was thirteen gazillion times cooler than she was when she entered college. We’ll call this roommate “Lynn”. Also lucky for Jane, Lynn was forward. It took about one week for Lynn to say “Hey, stop parting your hair in the middle!” If you ask Jane today she will tell you that’s the best advice she’s ever been given in college. But at the time, she was a little hesitant to try it. She was so hesitant, in fact, that Lynn helped her do her hair for the next week. Seriously. She saw people with side-parted hair in magazines, but she thought “who am I to part my hair like that?” Well there is a quote “Be the change you want to see in the world” and Jane lives by a quote that is similar (in that it is totally a parody of the quote); “Part your hair like the person you want to be in the world”. Sheer poetic genius…

Mae and Jane believe that tanning is a slippery slope. It is also a blotchy, streaky, skin-cancery slope. But one wintery night before Lynn was to go to a formal or something important, Lynn and Jane decided to try self tanner. The kind that you spray and it tans you all at once…. We entered college way before the days of the lotion that you put on every day and it darkens your skin gradually (that statement makes us sound old so we'll clarify "way before" means approximately "1 year before". But that's a long time when you're talking about sunless tanner.) Lynn finally decided it was a bad idea and went to get her tan professionally done but offered to spray the tan on for Jane. First of all, if you’re going to spray tan someone, read the bottle (and then go get a psych consult if you still think the stuff that Banana Boat thinks you can spray on will do anything for you… Seriously! The directions are so detailed with the occasional bolded print and ALL CAPS and sometimes BOTH, they seem to indicate that self tanning is as complicated as launching a team to the moon. Jane will tell you it’s harder than that, even.) When it recommends holding the bottle 10 inches away, do not spray from less than 10 inches away (ie: do not spray from 1 inch away… The failure will be greater than that of Apollo 13.) So Jane ended up looking like she had been prepped for surgery. Her torso looked as if someone had wiped iodine all over it to disinfect the area. Also, the tan was dripping and streaking. So of course Lynn and Jane invited everyone in to see… Jane may never live that down.

Every few years the ponytail comes back into style (as if it ever goes out of style).... But this means that the ponytail can be worn everywhere! It can be worn to the gym, to school, to parties. This happened during a particularly busy year for Jane, who likes to multitask and "kill two birds with one stone" and all of that. She could wear the same ponytail all day and save some time! Well, we’ll just tell you right now that the gym ponytail is tremendously different than the party ponytail. It’s like night and day. (Okay, it’s still a ponytail so it’s like night and later that night…) And people can often tell if you wore your ponytail to class all day and didn’t even attempt to refresh it before you came to their party.

Jane is fearful of bad haircuts (it even rivals her fear of certain arthropods). And near the end of her junior year, the unthinkable happened. She was on the receiving end of some seriously terrible layers (seriously). Some of her close friends offered encouragement but she could not shake the feeling that her hair looked a little like a mullet. So she walked around with her new haircut for a couple of days until she was mentioning her concerns to a friend before class. A girl who she would call more of an “acquaintance” than a “friend” (only because they didn’t know each other very well) burst in with “Oh, don’t worry! It can be fixed!” That was exactly what Jane needed to hear. Two lessons were learned here. Do not let a friend walk around with a bad haircut that can be fixed! And if you think you’ve received a hideous trim, don’t take your friends’ word for it… go get it fixed! You don’t need their permission and they don’t have to slouch under the weight of silly hairdo (seriously, have “Atlas” come talk to Jane the next time he thinks he has a lot to hold….)

If we had a nickel for every time Jane fell victim to a terrible fashion choice, well, we’d probably go have lunch… The point is that none of these terrible fashion decisions became habits… because her friends and classmates were there to push her back into line. But it really does take a village….